2009-03-21

PyHyphen 0.9.3
=====================

(c) 2008, 2009 Dr. Leo

Contact: fhaxbox66@googlemail.com

Project home: http://pyhyphen.googlecode.com
Mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/pyhyphen

New in version 0.9.3:

* added win32 binary of the C extension for Python 3.1
* added 'syllables' method to the hyphenator (can yield inconsistent results
  in langueages with non-standard hyphenation)


New in version 0.9.2

* make it compile with Python 3.0.1
* add win32 binary of the C extension for Python 3.0

New in version 0.9.1

* full support for Python 3.0
* merged 3.0 sources with the 2.x distribution.




New in Version 0.9:

* removed the 'inserted' method from the hyphenator class as it is not used in practice
  the word to be hyphenated must now be unicode (utf-8 encoded strings raise
  TypeError). The restriction to unicode is safer and more 3.0-compliant.
* fixed important bug in 'pairs' method that could cause a unicode error if 'word'
  was not encodable to the dictionary's encoding. In the latter case, the new
  version returns an empty list (consistent with other cases where the word
  is not hyphenable).
* the configuration script has been simplified and improved: it does not
  raise ImportError even if the package cannot be imported. This tolerance is
  needed to create a Debian package.



New in Version 0.8

- supports Python 2.x and 3.0 (in 2 separate distributions))
- contains the new C library hyphen-2.4 which implements an extended algorithm
  supporting
  - compound words (dictionaries are under development in the OpenOffice community))
   - parameters to fix the minimal number of characters to be cut off
      by hyphenation (lmin, rmin, compound_lmin and compound_rmin). )
      This may require code changes in existing apps.
- new en_US dictionary.
- many minor improvements under the hood
        



Contents


1. Overview
2. Code examples
3. Compiling and installing
4. How to get dictionaries
5. What's under the hood?
6. Testing
7. Contributing and reporting bugs





1. Overview

The gole of the PyHyphen project is to provide Python with a high quality hyphenation facility.
PyHyphen consists of the package 'hyphen' and the module 'textwrap2'. 
The source distribution supports Python 2.4 or higher, including Python 3.0.

1.1 The hyphen package contains:
    - at top level the definition of the class 'hyphenator' each instance of which
      can hyphenate and wrap words using a dictionary compatible with the hyphenation feature of
      OpenOffice and Mozilla.
    - the module dictools contains useful functions such as automatic downloading and
      installing dictionaries from a configurable repository. After installation, the
      OpenOffice repository is used by default.
     - config is a configuration file initialized at install time with default values
       for the directory where dictionaries are searched, and the repository for 
       downloads of dictionaries. Initial values are the package root and the OpenOffice
       repository for dictionaries.
     - hyph_en_US.dic is the hyphenation dictionary for US English as found on
       the OpenOffice.org repository.
    - 'hnj' is the C extension module that does all the ground work. It
      contains the C library hyphen-2.4 (or higher). It supports non-standard hyphenation
      with replacements as well as compound word hyphenation.
      I cannot think of a reason
      to access the wrapper class exported by 'hnj' directly rather than through
      the top level wrapper class hyphen.hyphenator. So 'hnj' is disregarded by
      'from hyphen import *'. Note that hyphenation dictionaries are invisible to the
      Python programmer. But each hyphenator object has a member 'language' which is a
      string showing the language of the dictionary in use.


1.2 The module 'textwrap2'

This module is an enhanced though backwards compatible version of the module
'textwrap' known from the Python standard library. Not very surprisingly, it adds
hyphenation functionality to 'textwrap'. To this end, a new key word parameter
'use_hyphenator' has been added to the __init__ method of the TextWrapper class which
defaults to None. It can be initialized with any hyphenator object. Note that until version 0.7
this keyword parameter was named 'use_hyphens'. So older code may need to be changed.'

1.3 hyphen_test

(no longer part of the distribution as of version 0.9.1; please
    access the svn repository)

This Python script is a framework for running large tests of the hyphen package.
A test is a list of 3 elements: a text file (typically a word list), its encoding and a
list of strings specifying a dictionary to be applied to the word list. Adding a test
is as easy as writing a function call. All results are logged.


2. Code examples

from hyphen import hyphenator
from hyphen.dictools import *

# Download and install some dictionaries in the default directory using the default
# repository, usually the OpenOffice website
for lang in ['de_DE', 'fr_FR', 'en_UK', 'ru_RU']:
    if not is_installed(lang): install(lang)

# Create some hyphenators
h_de = hyphenator('de_DE')
h_en = hyphenator('en_US')

# Now hyphenate some words

print h_en.pairs('beautiful')
[[u'beau', u'tiful'], [u'beauti', u'ful']]

print h_en.wrap('beautiful', 6)
[u'beau-', u'tiful']

print h_en.wrap('beautiful', 7)
[u'beauti-', u'ful']

from textwrap2 import fill
print fill('very long text...', width = 40, use_hyphens = h_en)


Note that the caller must handle words with hyphens  (e.g. Washington-based))
before passing the parts to the hyphenator. 

3. Compiling and installing

3.1 General requirements

PyHyphen works with Python 2.4 or higher, including 3.0.
There are pre-compiled binaries of the hnj module for win32 and Python 2.4, 2.5, 2.6 and 3.0.
On other platforms you will need a build environment such as gcc, make
and so on. PyHyphen is likely to work also with Python 2.3, but this could need some
fiddling.

3.2 Compiling and installing from source

Choose and download the source distribution (eather a zip archive or a tarball) from

    http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/PyHyphen

and unpack it in a temporary directory. Then cd to this directory.

You can compile and install the hyphen package
as well as the module textwrap2 by entering at the command line somethin like:

    python setup.py install

The setup script will first check the Python version and copy the required
version-specific files. The rest is done by setup-2.x or setup.3.x.

Second, setup-2.x or -3.x checks for a binary version
of hnj for your platform. If there is a binary that looks ok, this version is installed. Otherwise,
hnj is compiled from source. On Windows you will need MSVC 2003 or 2008 (for Python2.6), mingw
or whatever fits to your Python distribution.
If the distribution comes with a binary of 'hnj'
that fits to your platform and python version, you can still force a compilation from
source by entering

    python setup.py install --force_build_ext

Under Linux you may need root privileges, so you may want to enter something like

    sudo python setup.py install


 
 4. How to get dictionaries?
 
 Visit http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries for a
 complete list. If you know the language and country code of your favorite
 dictionary (e.g. 'it_IT' for Italian) and have internet access, you can take
 advantage of the install function in the hyphen.dictools module. See the code
 example above (2.) for more details, or read the module documentation.


5. What's under the hood?

the C extension module 'hnj' used by the hyphenator class defined in
__init__.py contains the C library hyphen-2.4 which is used by OpenOffice.org, Mozilla
and alike. The C sources have not been changed, let alone hnjmalloc.c which has
been slightly modify to use pythonic memory management and error handling.

For further information on the hyphenation library and available dictionaries visit
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries.



6. Testing (requires a checkout of the svn repository)

Please see the instructions in Demo/hyphen_test.py. All you need is a text file,
and its encoding. Copy the text file into the Demo/input directory, add a new function
call to hyphen_test.py, run it and read the .log file and the files created in the
output directory. There you will see the results for each word. You can specify a list
of dictionaries to be used. Then, hyphen_test will create an output file for each
dictionary used with a given word list.


7. Contributing and reporting bugs

Contributions, comments, bug reports, criticism and praise can be sent to the author.

The sources of PyHyphen are found in a Subversion repository at

    http://pyhyphen.googlecode.com
    
This is also where you can submit bug reports.


 
